Permission to reprint the abstract has not been received from the publisher.

This paper reviews the major economic trends that impact on government programs affecting the elderly. Issues are raised relating to income support programs, retirement trends, and health care for the elderly.

Permission to reprint the abstract has not been received from the publisher.

This study uses data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth to track the health coverage of parents in the year before and the year in which their children enroll in Medicaid. Use of such longitudinal data, compared to cross-sectional data, provides more insight into the dynamics of health insurance coverage and expansions in Medicaid. Using these data, we find that
approximately 16% of newly enrolled Medicaid children likely had access to private insurance through a parent. Moreover, most of the children enrolling in Medicaid were previously uninsured. We find little substitution of private for public health insurance among families living at or near the federal poverty line. Copyright ) 1998 Institute for Scientific Information

Permission to reprint the abstract has not been received from the publisher.

This paper re-examines the magnitude of crowd out among children. We use longitudinal data that allow us to identify and differentiate groups of children based on whether their eligibility for Medicaid was affected by the program's eligibility expansions. We investigate whether changes in insurance coverage of children affected by the expansions differed from changes in insurance coverage of children unaffected by the expansions. For example, we directly measure whether there was a greater decrease in private insurance coverage among children who became eligible for Medicaid than among children whose eligibility was unaffected. Our results suggest that there was relatively little crowd out among children. We estimate that 18.9% of the recent increase in Medicaid enrollment came from private insurance.

Bibliography Citation

Yazici, Esel Y. and Robert Kaestner. "Medicaid Expansions and the Crowding Out of Private Health." Inquiry 37,1 (2000): 23-32.